What is the future of classical recording? Silly question: Nobody knows
and everybody guesses. Which gives me a Prognosticator's License that is
just as good as yours. So here goes--but first, some background.
We need what my father called a Frame of Reference. A surround. You can say two things about classical music (how I hate that term--but it will have to do for the moment).
First, the totality of music that rates as "classical"--a bewilderingly vast area of sonics ex tending in place the world over and in time a thousand years, is a very small part of our American sales scene. We all know it. There is that fabled "only four percent of the market" figure, though I expect that eight percent might be a better average over recent decades.
Even at 10 percent, this would not rate as a very important dollar factor. So why bother? Why do we keep right on re cording classical mu sic, and importing classical music, in all its million-odd varieties? Second comes an answer to that question in our terms, hi-fi, because classical, on the whole, is vastly more important to recording than the mere dollar sales can ever suggest. That's why. Classical music is the industry's R & D area, you may believe. It is also the industry's prestige factor, as every record company knows. Furthermore, classical of one sort or another is the hi-fi man's testing ground; he is always "testing"--i.e., acquiring seductive new equipment. If, during depressions/recessions, hi-fi is to exist at all as a business, then classical music must go along with it.
Not that pop music (in all its forms) is useless for us--let's not go to extremes. Most fancy demo discs, you will note, offer a combination, often one side classical and the other pop, one sort or another. Or if two discs or two tapes, then one is classical and one is pop. This, of course, is already far from the marketable proportion: 50/50, and thus a large compliment to the importance of classical. Pop music does rate very well in hi-fi circles but it has curious disadvantages as a hi-fi medium--indeed, contradictions that make one wonder. Classical is easier.
In a positively negative way, virtually all "regular" pop music, i.e. that which is recorded for solid commercial distribution, is done via the immensely advantageous mixdown technique, not in real time. Tracks, groups of tracks, recorded at different times (and places), erased, selectively recorded again and again, mixed down to one or more "final" versions--possibly quite different. (And more can be made in future updatings). Marvelous flexibility! Terrific usefulness in a competitive market. Vast resources for otherwise technically impossible sound effects, including duets and trios and choruses built from one voice ... all of which is familiar to us.
BUT--do these fabulous techniques further the cause of good fi? Hardly. Yet they continue to grow ever fancier and ever more essential to the very life of pop (still using that term as a general one). Can we ever avoid them--for better fi--and still have the music itself as it should be? The magazine db has recently been pointing out that there still is no end to the number of available ins (on those huge boards) and outs (on the recorders) that recording engineers think are necessary to get down their basic audio material. Forty eight tracks? Many of us, out on the periphery, would think that an absurdity. Not those who are directly involved, within the pop industry.
True, the quality of copied audio in the various generations is slightly (!) improved since Sgt. Pepper. You can now do your analog mixing almost to your heart's content and come out with, well, an acceptable minimum in terms of audible distortion. We do remark ably well. Astonishingly well. And digital really gets around and into most studio equipment (it's on the way), added distortions via mix down will be strictly incidental, mere side effects not directly measurable as the result of copying. You can copy ad infinitum in digital. But does this mean we are in the clear as to optimum hi fi? Oh no, not by any means.
I must be careful to keep within my own non-engineer bounds but I do sense, via all sorts of engineering comment and many a paper in the mags, at AES and so on, that there are insidious and even drastic problems in the mixing of many mikes and/or many tracks quite aside from the degradation that comes with (analog) copying.
Especially in the use of many simultaneous mikes, which is the sine qua non of many tracks. Simultaneous, that is, by the time they are put together in the final audio product. Most conscientious audio engineers are against multi-miking, whether for pop--where it is necessary--or for classical--where it really isn't, but often has been used. If you want real fi, you keep things SIMPLE. Yes? This trend of thinking is inescapable.
Everywhere in high audio circles one reads of the simple approach as technically the best, and not only for miking, either. What, after all, led to the direct-to-disc movement? More than a desire for fewer tape tracks--a preference for NO tracks at all. Now would there be any point, I ask, in feeding, say, 48 microphones directly to a disc lathe, even with the finest of state-of the-art (digital?) mixing, direct-coupled, no transformers, etc., etc.? If I am right, you try that and you'll still have 99 percent of the technical problems you had before, including all the more subtle ones involving phasings, cancellations, proximities and heaven alone knows what else! So in the developing pop scene we see an ever increasing conflict be tween the musical needs of the performance in recording terms--many mikes, many tracks, many overlays and erasures and more overlays--and the strict requirements for state-of-the-art sound quality. This is not unlike the problem of the pop "live" performance, which must compete in the flesh with the mixdown recorded versions of the very same music, often with embarrassing results. How can a band playing before an audience stand up to its own reputation gained via recordings? Ask the bands--they have to sweat this one out.
Ah yes, you may say, but we have to take into account the fabled spontaneity of the live situation, the excitement of real, honest-to-God listeners right out there in front of you. Classical musicians put this aspect very much first and never tire of talking about it in relation to recording. For sure! The live element of spontaneity is exactly the same for pop as for classical--and maybe more, what with so many screaming thousands out there reacting. But Relatively Listening Look at classical again. The stuff (still using the general term ... ) marvelously lends itself to simple microphone techniques, though it can be done in the more complex modes and often has been. I personally have enjoyed the musical impact of multi-mike classical recording, even if the overlay technique, not in real time, is rare, almost non-existent. I have not found the increased distortions very much of an impediment to good listening--if and when the results are musically interesting. It's a matter of relative values, and each of us must decide in terms of our own enjoyment.
Nevertheless, it is clear that most classical music, of all kinds, does record gracefully via the simplest and most direct means, the very sort that pro duce the highest fi. If not better than fancy multi-mix-downs, the classical results of simplicity in the recording are most certainly just as good. Can you say that of pop? Classical music, of course, was in tended for live performance and its sonics were designed directly for that purpose; so why shouldn't it sound best in live performance? Even in live broadcasting its sound comes over well, if not ideally from the point of view of your home loudspeaker. The spontaneity, complete with real applause (not faked), is always there and most of the musical sense too. Even our studio or concert-hall recordings of classical are invariably in real time, though edited, all of the performers playing together; only once in a blue green moon is there an overlay, and that usually is a drastic rescue device to correct some hideous slip where there is no alternative take.
Classical procedures are inherently simple, if subtle. Pop recording is inherently complex. Classical thrives on basic, clean recording techniques;
pop, most of it, suffers from the same and oddly enough must adapt, that is to say, become more like classical in order to produce the required fi.
Now all this is merely one techno logical approach to the matter of classical music's extraordinary importance in hi-fi, sales or no. Look at another sort of basic difference--in the very definitions of classical and pop.
Classical music as a whole, in all its million forms, can be compared to the millions of books in a large public or university library. The essence of both is variety, to a perfectly enormous degree. Classical music is by definition music from all sorts of times and places and eras, even including a bit of our own. Pop music, in contrast, is by definition the music of one time, one purpose, one era--our own. It is NOW music, with maybe a bit of yesterday, the nostalgia and the golden oldies. Not very yesterday, even so, and not really much like yesterday in sound, at that. Pop's biggest asset is decidedly not variety, or shall I say, micro-variety, even within its many facets. It must always pursue sameness, with the most carefully minimized micro-variety of innovation within the current styles--and no matter that each change is blown up to vast significance! That is a healthy part of the game.
For the expert ear, these micro-changes are indeed sensational and important, always. You wouldn't know it, but I was just then thinking of the court music of Louis XV of France, which though composed for a much tinier and more restricted population than our huge, sprawling audience of millions, still went along by the same rules as our own pop. Strict, almost rig id styles and, within them, minute micro-differences that were endlessly relished by the avid fans as each new performance took place or new printed collection was released from the presses.
Thus we spend vast energy dashing after the latest pop craze or style, converting ourselves hastily from rock to punk to New Wave and on to neo rock (completing a circle?) as if these phenomena were each enormously different from all the others. In the same way, we dash from one Broad way musical hit to the next, ever more sensationally new, and we are amazed when outsiders tell us they really are remarkably the same, year after year, even to the stock voices and stock characters. Whenever I hear another of those squawk-box sopranos with the flat tones and earthy diction, I say here we go again, it must be the latest. But put a musical comedy beside an opera by Handel, or even Johann Strauss-pop music decidedly in their respective times--and the differences suddenly become MACRO. A whole different order of magnitude, no matter who is listening.
Pop, then, is necessarily monotonous from a purely physical viewpoint.
It is all "the same"--that is, of our times. Like the sameness we see and so much enjoy in old movies of the '30s--they reek of their time, far more than anybody could have then imagined. Pop is fashion, as with human decor. Those sweeping long skirts of 1937 or so, the flat-sided hairdos of the girls of 1940, the perky round little cloche hats so typical of the late 1920s.
I was there--I didn't even notice them. Who would? What we noticed, as always, was the micro-variation, from hat to hat, skirt to skirt, hairdo to hairdo. We were totally unaware of the overall. We always are. It's natural.
It's healthy. But in pop music it doesn't make for good fi.
Macro vs. Micro Finally, since I am beginning to get into more vaporous questions, think of one more curious aspect of the classical importance in audio. It is the combination of MACRO variety, precisely the opposite from the above--variety out of a hundred DIFFERENT times and places, a thousand of them--and the sheer challenge that this variety offers, for recording as well as for the testing hi-fi listener. No more monotony! You can always jump a century or two if you get bored. And the oddest part of it is that the very inadaptability for recording of so much classical mu sic is precisely the positive aspect we find most stimulating. Pop music is too easy. We want the impossible, even if it takes a little longer. Like the cannons in the 1812 Overture. Will we ever tire of them? The day that some recording engineer records those cannons as written, as "composed," in real time simultaneously with the sound of the huge orchestra, I will run out and order the record in duplicate. I'll need two copies, after all. Now is that a challenge? Classical music is full of a vast number of challenges, which test and try the parameters of recording, even as we continue to expand them and polish them. By contrast, the main "challenge" of pop music of most sorts is merely, for hi-fi recording, how can we get along without mix-downs? We can't, we really can't. Not for real pop.
Not for most pop. I'll take my hi-fi classical any day, thanks.
P.S.
Jazz? Oh, didn't you know? Jazz isn't pop, or won't be much longer.
These days it rates as classical and gets taught by university professors and studied by musical archaeologists from the original (recorded) artifacts. Also Gershwin and Kurt Weill, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter--they're getting too old for nostalgia. Some day our present pop will also be classical--what then? Maybe the Collegium Whom (a minor misunderstanding of the original title, The Who), newly recorded with classical purity via a single laser mike. Who knows? Could be.
- Edward Tatnall Canby
(adapted from Audio magazine, Aug. 1980)
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